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Just as Oakley-style plastic lenses for cycling were around in the 1890s, so were MTB-style knobby tyres. Most solid tyres of the period – as fitted to high-wheelers, which didn’t need the suspension offered by pneumatics – were smooth. Most pneumatics were patterned with grooves. However, for serious mud-plugging on an overseas tour on Humber Safety cycles in 1893, the Stead brothers were equipped with the “latest bicycle Torrilliou pneumatic tyres and Edwards’ corrugate cover.”

According to an article in their father’s The Daily Paper (a short-lived publication from the father of New Journalism, creator of the tabloid reporting style, and who in 1912 went down with the Titanic), this “corrugate cover”…

…was an immense success, and attracted great attention whenever the cycles stopped. They were the first of the kind that had been seen in France, and they were very greatly admired, not without cause, for they entirely prevent side-slipping, and they render riding in rain and mud as safe as in dry weather.”

This strap-on knobbifier didn’t catch on even though cyclists could have done with the traction: many of the unimproved rural roads of the day were mud pools when wet.

The ridges and grooves on the pneumatic bicycle tyres of the 1890s were distinctive. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Priory School, Sherlock Holmes demonstrated his ability to identify bicycle tyre treads:

“I am familiar with forty-two different impressions left by tyres.”

Conan Doyle likely borrowed this supposed skill from his brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung, author of the Raffles novels about a gentleman thief of the 1890s. Two years before Conan Doyle wrote The Adventure of the Priory School, Hornung placed his anti-hero on a bicycle in The Black Mask and had him ride upon the “incomparable Ripley Road.”

“I had my eye on the road all the way from Ripley to Cobham, and there were more Dunlop marks than any other kind. Bless you, yes, they all leave their special tracks.”

In the cycle trade press, a Lovell Diamond Safety bicycle of 1897 was advertised as having a tyre tread that featured the company’s name in reverse, which, in certain conditions, would decorate a dirt road surface with a corporate signature.

In 1925, an Ariel bicycle was shod with bicycle tyres featuring the swastika. However, this Indian religious symbol was not yet resonant with connotations of Nazis and was used as symbol of luck.

One thought on “Tread carefully or your strap-on knobbifier may leave the wrong impression”

The Wikipedia article says “Following a brief surge of popularity in Western culture, the right-facing swastika was adopted as a symbol of the Nazi Party of Germany in 1920.”
The tyre is from 5 years later so it is unclear what association the swastika had at the time.

"How cyclists were the first to push for good roads & became the pioneers of motoring." ROADS WERE NOT BUILT FOR CARS is a print, Kindle, iPad and free e-book about roads history.
The coming of the railways in the 1830s killed off the stage-coach trade; almost all rural roads reverted to low-level local use. Cyclists were the first group in a generation to use roads and were the first to push for high-quality sealed surfaces and were the first to lobby for national funding and leadership for roads. They were also the first promoters of motoring; the first motoring journalists had first been cycling journalists; and there was a transfer of technology from cycling to motoring without which cars as we know them wouldn't exist! Nearly seventy car marques – including Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC – had bicycling beginnings.
'Roads Were Not Built for Cars' is a history book, focussing on a time when cyclists had political clout, in Britain and especially in America. The book researches the Roads Improvement Association - a lobbying group created by the Cyclists' Touring Club in 1886 - and the Good Roads movement organised by the League of American Wheelmen in the same period.

The book was published in a Kickstarter limited-edition in September 2014. Island Press of Washington, D.C. published a revised second-edition in April 2015.
Thanks to research grants and advertising support, text-only PDF chapters from the book are slowly being made available for free to read online. The free distribution model is being used in order to get the book seen by as many eyes as possible. The paid-for publications are richly illustrated; the free versions have had the pix stripped out and replaced with adverts.
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